Resources for Pre-post-racial America

Here are some articles I’ve found thought-provoking in relation to the different themes in the book Pre-Post-Racial America. A few are religious; most are not. They are offered in the hope they’ll let you go deeper in thinking about these issues.

Additionally, people have asked me how they can go deeper in their work around anti-oppression. Here are a few organizations I respect deeply:

There are also LOTS of organizations practicing anti-oppression values in their organizing work. Seek them out and work with them; practice is the best teacher!

A resource for the whole book:

Throughout the book I talk about “Beloved Community.” I usually use it as a substitute for “the realm (or kindom) of God,” but I borrowed it from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who borrowed it from theologian Josiah Royce of Fellowship Of Reconciliation (which is a partner of the Oakland Peace Center!). Here are a few references to it that you might enjoy reading about.

The King Center in Atlanta discusses how Dr. King understood beloved community (as well as other important elements of his philosophy/theology).

Dr. Jeff RItterman of Physicians for Social Responsibility wrote a really interesting article for Huffington Post in January 2014 about the health impacts of practicing Dr. King’s vision of Beloved Community.

One of my personal heroes, Grace Lee Boggs, wrote for Yes! Magazine in 2004 about how the world might be different if we had practiced Dr. King’s most radical teachings (about being a beloved community) to heart, and how we could still do it today. In many ways, that is what she did in Detroit with the latter part of her life. (If you don’t know about Grace Lee Boggs, here is a brief bio and her is an excerpt from the film about her fascinating life.)

Introduction

I will never say anything as concise and powerful and elegant about why we struggle to navigate racism in America as Chimamanda Adichie does in her 18-minute video “The Danger of the Single Story.” That’s why I excerpt that Ted Talk at the beginning of this chapter.

Chapter One: Fifty Years Later: The Hermeneutics of the Civil Rights Movement

Thinking about the civil rights movement, then and now:

This article on the Dream Defenders in Florida: “The group is composed mostly of college-age 20-somethings, though it has some as young as 18 and others in their 50s. They came from across the state to the Tallahassee Capitol building in July with to push for an alternative to Florida’s “stand your ground” law. During a 31-day sit-in of Gov. Rick Scott’s office, they demanded a review of stand your ground and presented their version, “Trayvon’s law,” which would repeal it. They asked for an end to racial profiling and the school-to-prison pipeline.”

This article in the New Yorker on Isabella Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns: “Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century—a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholar—and told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of. Narrative nonfiction is risky; it has to be grabby, telling, and true. To bear analytical weight, it has to be almost frighteningly shrewd. In “The Warmth of Other Suns,” three lives, three people, three stories, are asked to stand in for six million. Can three people explain six million?” Better yet, this interview with the author on Democracy Now.

This article by Hamden Rice, “Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did.” “Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s. It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment. This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.”

This article on Mapping the New Jim Crow: “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities,” writes Alexander. “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”

This essay by civil rights leader Bernard Lafayette on the role of the church in the civil rights movement: “Beyond the immediate goal of changing the unjust policies regarding the buses, the Montgomery movement served to transform the self image of thousands of participants. The concept of becoming maladjusted to the system of segregation on the buses led to a broader transformation of individual and collective identity. (“And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God” Rom 12:2). Finding practical application for the scriptures, the participants gathered the resolve and determination to sustain the struggle as long as it took to end segregation on Montgomery buses.”

This video by Black Alliance for Just Immigration on the crime that is mass incarceration.

Journalist Jose Vargas offered a great Ted Talk on the issue of the term “illegal immigrant:” “I Am an Illegal Immigrant,” in April 2013. He also recently made an excellent film called Documented.

This op-ed piece on WBUR called “The Second Great Migration” makes some connections between Mexican Americans and African Americans in US history. (I am careful throughout this book not to conflate the experiences of different racial groups, but the piece tells some important history.)

To specifically learn about the Bracero program, the Southern Poverty Law Center has provided a helpful summary.

This article on the #IAmAnImmigrant campaign talks about the very recent immigrant response to anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK by the ruling Conservative party. (Anti-African and anti-Muslim sentiments and violence are on the rise throughout Europe.) Just so you know it’s not just the USA dealing with these issues.

Nick Chiles’s article on White Fragility: “For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts,” she said. “This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not ‘doing.’ In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, ‘What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.’ It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.”

Mason Hsieh’s article, “Screw You, I am Asian ‘American'”: Here’s the thing. I get that I’m Asian. I have black hair and almond shaped eyes. I also have an American passport. And, as a second generation American, born and raised in California, I find it fascinating that my initial answer to where I’m “from” is not sufficient.

Eddie Huang’s “Bamboo-Ceiling TV:”Despite being the “man’s” preferred lapdog of color, everything Asian-American immigrants have was fought for. We still wake up spotting the man 10 points, walking with our heads down, apologizing for our FOB-y aunts and uncles as if aspiring to wash your shirt or do your taxes were really such an insidiously foreign idea.

San Francisco (and many cities) passed a sit/lie ordinance making it illegal to sit or lie on sidewalks or benches. The law is targeted primarily at homeless people. This article notes that the ordinance has not proven effective. This article suggests it also does not address underlying causes of homelessness.

If you’d like to learn about current conscious hip hop, this article might interest you.

An op-ed on class, race, and the Anacostia river on the al-Jazeera website.

The New York Times op-ed piece on the Tsarvaev’s Whiteness: “In the aftermath of the bombings, we sought to answer two questions: If white people perceived Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as less white, did that influence their support for treating him harshly? (Tamerlan was dead by this point.) And if people varied in how white they considered Mr. Tsarnaev to be, what psychological propensities, if any, determined whether they perceived him as more like “us” or more like “them”?”

Fear, Inc., the now-famous report by the Center for American Progress about the intentional cultivation of Islamaphobia for political purposes after 9/11